The availability of content such as videos, audio files, photos, and text over networks such as the Internet has grown at impressive rates. This growth has been fueled largely by the popularity of social media providers/platforms that register users, receive content from their users, and distribute the content to others. Put another way, users may be seen as content creators that publish their content through social media platforms. Other content creators publish content using their own websites and/or network-based exchanges and services such as online forums, chat rooms, and the like.
In many instances the created content can be automatically tagged with information such as user identifications, date/time information or geographic information that specifies a location where the content was created. For example, cameras equipped with Global Positioning Satellite (“GPS”) units or other location-aware systems may embed into an image file latitude/longitude coordinates that indicate where a picture was taken. In addition, modern hand-held devices such as smartphones may be equipped with a GPS sensor, which allows users to generate content (text, photos and videos) with their devices and immediately share the content through a plurality of social networks. Moreover, some devices allow users to manually input the foregoing and other information for embedding into the content. Furthermore, editing software may allow a user to embed or otherwise associate information along with the content after the content was created.
Thus, various content available online may be tagged with both automatically and manually curated information that may be useful when parsing through the overwhelming amount of content that is available. In particular, because social media has become a real-time, instant data source, obtaining tags that indicate the geographic location where the content originated could be valuable across multiple markets, including news, marketing, first response, and others.
Conventional systems have been developed in an attempt to organize the content in a meaningful way. For example, various social media platforms expose Application Programming Interfaces that allow access to their data using various query parameters, including location parameters. However, conventional systems fail to leverage multiple sources of content such as different social media providers, websites, online exchanges, and knowledge databases. Conventional systems also fail to collect, aggregate, and present in a meaningful way the diversity of content.
As such, what is needed is to be able to collect and aggregate content from different providers of content such as social media platforms, websites, online exchanges, and knowledge database. What is further needed is to be able to search for social media by geography and present the aggregated content in a meaningful way that identifies the location of where the content originated. These and other problems exist.